The Weather Notebook: Idaho Hurricanes

Idaho Hurricanes
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Dave Thurlow, Host

The state that's famous for its spuds may become known for its windstorms in the next decade. But these winds of up to 200 miles per hour would be produced by people. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.

The HomeSaver Project
At Idaho's National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, scientists are trying to figure out how tornadoes and hurricanes cause damage to buildings. Right now the lab has plenty of elbow room but not enough wind. The facility covers a space as big as Rhode Island. It sits across the southeastern plateau of Idaho, where hurricanes are absent and tornadoes are quite rare.

The plan is to build a huge test site to put actual houses through a simulated hurricane. The first step is already under way. It's a scale model that uses fans to produce winds of 90 miles an hour, which are blown against mock houses that are only about 10 percent the size of a real house.

The hope is for a much bigger facility that could test actual one-story houses. These unlucky homes would be thrashed by winds up to 120 miles per hour. The winds would carry raindrops and bits of debris, just like the gusts of an actual hurricane. The third and biggest plan is for a huge structure that could put two-story houses inside winds of up to 200 miles per hour. These homes would sit on a giant turntable, 80 feet across, that would spin back and forth to reproduce the shifting winds of an actual storm.

Whether these human-caused hurricanes will ever reach Idaho depends on the budget officers back in Washington, D.C. The research could help engineers learn how to build safer homes. However, the cost for the biggest test site is estimated at over 70 million dollars. Even for Idaho, that's no small potatoes.

Thanks to contributing writer Bob Henson and for more information on the Idaho laboratory, visit our website at mountwashington.org. Thanks to Subaru and the National Science Foundation.